Social Influence

What Social Influence covers

Social Influence is examined in Paper 2, Social context and behaviour. It covers conformity and Asch's study, obedience, agency theory and the authoritarian personality, bystander intervention and Piliavin's subway study and crowd and collective behaviour.

The 4 subtopics

Each one has its own page.

• Conformity and Asch's studyConformity, Asch's line judgement study and its findings, and how majority size, anonymity, task difficulty, personality and expertise affect conforming.Open →
• Obedience, agency theory and the authoritarian personalityMilgram's obedience study and its variations, agency theory and the agentic state, the effect of authority, proximity and culture, and Adorno's authoritarian personality.Open →
• Bystander intervention and Piliavin's subway studyProsocial behaviour, the effect of other bystanders, the cost of helping, similarity and expertise, and Piliavin's subway study with its findings and ethics.Open →
• Crowd and collective behaviourProsocial and antisocial crowds, social loafing and deindividuation, Zimbardo's and Diener's evidence, and the effects of culture, personality and morality.Open →

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Take Social Influence further

The same content, four other ways.

Commonly confused

Pairs that lose marks when they are blurred together.

• Conformity vs Obedience

  Conformity: yielding to pressure from a group of equals with no order given. Obedience: following a direct order from a person in authority.

• Autonomous state vs Agentic state

  Autonomous state: acting on your own conscience and feeling responsible for your actions. Agentic state: acting for an authority figure and feeling little personal guilt.

• Diffusion of responsibility vs Social loafing

  Diffusion of responsibility: the spread of the duty to help across everyone present in an emergency. Social loafing: reduced individual effort when working as part of a group.

Questions from this topic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What is conformity?

   Model answer

   Conformity is changing your behaviour or opinions to match those of a group. Conformity to majority influence means going along with what most of the group does.

2. 2

   What is the difference between a social factor and a dispositional factor?

   Model answer

   A social factor is part of the situation, such as the size of the group. A dispositional factor is part of the person, such as their personality.

3. 3

   What was the aim of Asch's study of conformity?

   Model answer

   Asch aimed to find out whether people would conform to a majority giving an obviously wrong answer. The task was an unambiguous line-judging task.

4. 4

   Describe the procedure of Asch's line study.

   Model answer

   A naive participant sat with a group of confederates and said aloud which of three lines matched a standard line. The confederates all gave the same wrong answer on 12 of the 18 trials. The real participant answered last or next to last.

5. 5

   What did Asch's control group show?

   Model answer

   A control group judged the lines alone and made mistakes on fewer than 1% of trials. The task was therefore easy, so errors in the main study were caused by the group.

6. 6

   On the critical trials, how often did Asch's participants give the wrong majority answer?

   Model answer

   Participants gave the wrong majority answer on about 37% of the critical trials.

What is inside Levo

Six ways to work the same material.

Social Influence revision questions

What does Social Influence cover in AQA GCSE Psychology?

4 subtopics: conformity and asch's study, obedience, agency theory and the authoritarian personality, bystander intervention and piliavin's subway study and crowd and collective behaviour. Each one has its own page with questions and model answers.

How is Social Influence organised?

By the AQA 8182 specification, subtopic by subtopic, so it matches the order you are taught it in.